A couple of questions concerning the new reflector

Meta
1

First of all a big thank you for the new reflector. In my eyes it’s really a big success. Especially the ability to embed pictures is a huge benefit and it even causes someone like me, who is really lazy when it comes to writing, to post some reports about my recent activations.

While creating my recent activation reports a couple of questions came up. Maybe somebody could give a short answer to this topics:

  1. If you take a look e.g on my latest report Following the footsteps of an English Activator than you will recognize that all landscape pictures are fixed in the text and all portrait format photos can be clicked on and when doing so the picture will be displayed on a gray background. I guess this distinct kind of embedding is caused by the different sizes of the images. What is the max. width and/or height for images, so that they will stay fixed in the text?

  2. Another surprising behavior is that if I embed a link to an image from another website, the image will be automatically downloaded/copied from the referenced website to the SOTA reflector. Other (non-image) links don’t behave like this, e.g. links to videos. Is this an intended behavior or are there any tricks to avoid this copying of referenced images?

  3. My last question is more like a feature request. The reflector has already the feature to notify the logged on users about some events (Take a look at the speech bubble at the right top of the page). Is there any possibility that I would be notified if a new topic has been created by a particular member of the reflector? For example if I’ve a preferred list of members, who I expect interesting activation reports.

73 Stephan, DM1LE

2

  1. As fas as I can see for images on upload:
    Max image size - 3072kb
    Max attachment size - 1024kb
    Max image width - 690
    Max image height - 500

  2. For embedded images there are three parameters that are set:
    Retrieve images from remote URLs to insert the correct width and height dimensions.
    Convert remote images to local images by downloading them; this prevents broken images.
    Create thumbnails and lightbox images that are too large to fit in a post.
    I think there is a way for a user to inhibit this behaviour but Jon would need to advise.

  3. There are email, watch, track and mute parameters that any user can set “Preferences” which is accessed via your avatar. Beyond those there is nothing else - however the product is in continuous development so things may change.
    73 Jim G0CQK

3

Hello Jim,

thanks for your answers!

  1. This would explain the observed behaviour, as my pictures in landscape format have a width and height less than the given values, while my embedded pictures in portrait format have a slightly larger height with 533 pixels. I will try the mentioned image dimensions in one of my next activation reports.

  2. OK, let’s wait for Jon’s reply, whether a user maybe able to control the way how referenced images are treated by the reflector software.

  3. I’ve seen the mentioned preferences, but as I understood, they mainly focus on categories and don’t allow any filtering based on a members name. Maybe in the future there will be more sophisticated filtering options added to the system.

73 Stephan, DM1LE

4

I’ve seen one occasion when a WordPress blog’s content was pulled into the reflector, text, pictures and all, where it looked as if the poster had intended to put a link. It happened twice in one thread. It could, of course, have been a user error, though…

73, Rick M0LEP

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I think pulling in videos doesn’t happen by design. I guess it would also start to stress our storage limits if this happened alot. So you can ‘embed’, say, youtube videos but the video itself isn’t downloaded localy to our server like the images are.

Jon

6

Hi Jon,

yes I agree with you. It doesn’t make sense to download or copy videos to the reflector.
I just wondered, why images have been “hijacked” :smile:
But as Jim already mentioned, the reason seems to be to prevent broken links to images.

73 Stephan, DM1LE